Tomorrow I am off to Malmö to give a copyright & Creative Commons presentation at a seminar on Open Access and Scientific Publication. This should be an interesting event (not because I am there) because the speakers are an interesting group concerned with increasing accessiblity to scientific publication. Judging from the amount of registered participants it should be a good meeting. I am looking forward to the trip.
commons
Case studies
One thing that often surprises me is the fascination with big numbers. I think I first noticed this when I began working with Creative Commons and reporters wanted to have numbers: in particular they wanted to know how many “things” were licensed under a Creative Commons license. For several years I answered “more than 50 million” copyrightable items were licensed and the reporters were happy – they had a big quote. Actually 50 million is nothing, peanuts and it’s also irrelevant.
Big numbers are of no practical use. They are mental popcorn, in the end unfulfilling.
That’s why I was happy to see that CC launched a case study wiki some time ago:
The Case Study Wiki chronicles past, present and future success stories of CC. The goal is to create a community-powered system for qualitatively measuring the impact of Creative Commons around the world. All are encouraged to add interesting, innovative, or noteworthy uses of Creative Commons licenses.
Simply the list of CC licensed books made bookmarking the site worthwile. Like all book browsing I ended downloading:
Philipp Lenssen 55 ways to have fun with google
Christian Siefkes From Exchange to Contributions
Marleen Wynants & Jan Cornelis (eds) How Open is the Future? Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios
inspired by Free & Open-Source SoftwareGustavo Cardoso The Media in the Network Society
It’s free and gratis: What’s not to like?
CC photos of Göteborg on Flickr
Flickr has over 2 billion images – that’s a lot. If you type in the search term ”Göteborg” – my home town – suddenly you have the more manageable number of 66 804 hits. Of these 13 820 images are available under one of the six Creative Commons licenses which allow others to reuse the images.
The reason I know these numbers is that I have been doing some preparatory work for a project. I have looked through the 13 820 images and chosen 279 of them.
My licensing book is out
My short book on open licenses in Swedish Copyright – Copyleft: En guide om upphovsrätt och licenser på nätet is finished and it is online at the IIS, the organisation who commissioned the work. The book covers seven licenses and the Creative Commons system.
The licenses discussed/explained are the Free Art License 1.3, GNU Free Documentation License, the Sparc Author Addendum, the Ethymonics Free Music License, the Common Documentation License, the, the BSD Free Documentation License and the Open Game License.
I am happy that the work is done and I hope that it will serve to help the curious learn more about licensing.
Terms of Use
My friend, collegue and fearless explorer of the public domain Eva has sent me a copy of her new book “Terms of Use”
Love the tigers on the front… If it is anything like her last book it will be great. I will be reviewing it here later but I just wanted to give anyone a heads up straight away – this is an interesting book.
Picasa chooses Creative Commons
Google has announced that it is enabling users to choose Creative Commons licenses in its Picasa Web Albums service. Users storing their photographs on Picasa can either license each photo individually or set a defualt license.
(via Creative Commons blog)
Licensing Hacking
Finally! The Creative Commons team (Kalle and I) have spent two days drinking strong coffee, arguing and laughing in an effort to update the Swedish licenses from version 2.5 to 3.0. Now the license drafts are done and we have invited people, organisations and government bodies to read and comment on the work.
If any of you readers want to join in the bags of fun then feel free to surf in to www.creativecommons.se/drafts/
Right now I am looking forward to drinking a congratulatory beer or two. Since I am totally brain-drained and coffee-pickled.
Free licenses upheld
Lessig reports:
So for non-lawgeeks, this won’t seem important. But trust me, this is huge.
I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE “IP” court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them “open source”) copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.
In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.
Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.
Welcome Singapore
Singapore has become the 47th jurisdiction to adapt and implement the Creative Commons licenses. Congratulations from the Swedish CC Team to the CC Singapore team, led by Associate Professor Samtani Anil & Assistant Professor Giorgios Chelioti at the Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy.
Creative Commons Norway
Norway has launched its Creative Commons (CC Norway) licenses – Congratulations Norway!
The CC Norway team is headed by Project Leads Gisle Hannemyr and Peter Lenda, who with Haakon Flage Bratsberg, Thomas Gramstad, Tore Hoel, and Vebjørn Søndersrød, coordinated the license porting process with Creative Commons International and conducted public discussion with local and international legal experts. Check out the press release (in English and Norwegian).
The launch of the licenses will be celebrated on Friday, June 6th – which happens to be Sweden’s national day!